Build 2020: Terminal Goes 1.0, WSL2 Ships, and Windows Gets a Package Manager

Microsoft’s Build conference kicked off today, all-virtual this year, and the developer-facing announcements came fast. If you live in a terminal window on Windows, this was a good day.

Windows Terminal hits 1.0

Windows Terminal has been in active preview since 2019, and it’s now officially 1.0. For anyone who’s been stuck juggling cmd.exe, PowerShell windows, and a separate SSH client, this is the app that finally makes Windows feel like a real place to do command-line work — tabs, panes, GPU-accelerated text rendering, Unicode support, and actual customization via a JSON settings file. It’s open source too, which has meant a steady stream of community contributions since day one. If you haven’t tried it, today’s a fine day to grab it from the Microsoft Store.

WSL2 ships for real

The bigger deal, arguably, is that WSL2 is now shipping as part of the upcoming Windows 10 May 2020 Update. WSL2 replaces the original translation-layer approach of WSL1 with a real Linux kernel running in a lightweight VM, which means full system call compatibility and dramatically better file system performance for Linux workloads. For developers who’ve wanted to run Docker, Linux-native build tools, or just apt-get things without dual-booting or using a full VM, this closes a gap that’s existed for years. It’s genuinely one of the more interesting things Microsoft has shipped for developers in a while — a company that used to treat Linux as the enemy is now bundling a real kernel with its flagship OS.

A package manager, finally

Windows developers have long envied apt, brew, and chocolatey (yes, chocolatey exists, but it’s third-party). Microsoft previewed its own answer today: winget, a command-line package manager for installing and managing software on Windows. It’s early — preview status, not everyone will get access right away — but the idea of winget install <thing> becoming as normal as it is on Linux or Mac is a meaningful quality-of-life shift for anyone setting up a new machine or scripting provisioning.

Project Reunion

Microsoft also unveiled Project Reunion, aimed at unifying Win32 and UWP development so that the years of API fragmentation between “classic” Windows apps and the more modern UWP model stop being a tax on every Windows developer’s roadmap. Details are still light, but the pitch is a common set of APIs and tools that work regardless of which app model you started with — old WinForms app or shiny UWP app, same access to modern Windows capabilities going forward.

The OpenAI supercomputer

Separately from the dev-tools news, Microsoft detailed the Azure-based supercomputer it built specifically for OpenAI’s research. It’s a striking data point about where cloud infrastructure investment is heading — purpose-built, large-scale compute for a single AI research partner, on Azure hardware. Given how quickly language models have been scaling up, having dedicated supercomputer-class infrastructure earmarked for that work says a lot about what Microsoft expects to come out of the OpenAI partnership.

Taken together, today’s news reads like Microsoft doubling down on developers as a core audience again — better terminals, real Linux support, a package manager, and infrastructure bets on AI research. Build continues through tomorrow, so there’s likely more to come.